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IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, IP YUK-YUI DISCUSSES HIS FASCINATION FOR CALL OF DUTY, HIS ADMIRATION FOR PHILIP SOLOMON, AND THE CREATION OF HIS STUNNING HONG KONG TRILOGY.

IP Yuk-Yiu is an experimental filmmaker, media artist, art educator, and independent curator. His works have been showcased extensively at international festivals including the European Media Art Festival, New York Film Festival in the “Views From the Avant-garde” program), Image Festival, FILE Festival, VideoBrasil, Transmediale, ISEA and more. He is the founder of the art.ware project, an independent curatorial initiative focusing on the promotion of new media art in Hong Kong. Yuk-Yiu has also lectured extensively on film, video and media art and has taught at Emerson College, Massachusetts College of Art and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Currently he is Associate Professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. His recent works explore emergent and hybrid forms of cinema. Yuk-Yiu lives and works in Hong Kong.

This interview was produced by the students of Master's Degree Program in Arts, Markets and Cultural Heritage at IULM.

GVA: Can you briefly describe your education?

My education background is in philosophy and cinema. I completed my graduate study in film production, focusing on experimental filmmaking.

Ip Yuk-Yui, The Griffith Cycle, 2002

"video / b&w / sound / 4 min. / 2002 Recycling a scene from a D.W. Griffith short, THE GRIFFITH CIRCLE explores the enigma of the cinematic space that dominated classical film practices for over a century. It turns a simple and often neglected act of screen direction into a playful meditation on spatial construction and a symbolic game of cinematic “hide and seek”."

GVA: Can you name some influences - not necessarily artistic ones - that played a key role in your evolution as an artist?

To cite influences, artistic or otherwise, will be an endless task that results with a long list. But I will still try to name two. First I am always drawn to and inspired by popular media such as films and video games. Popular media are interesting prisms that refract our collective desires, fantasy, anxiety, fear, moral codes and more, which I find amazing. Second, for the recent machinima series, I think I am indebted to Phil Solomon. Phil Solomon is an artist whom I have admired since I was in college. His hand-processed films are some of the most poetic and beautiful personal works that I have ever seen. However I was quite puzzled and disappointed when he first released his machinima works (Crossroad, Rehearsals for Retirement), a series that he made with and for the late Mark LaPore (whom is also a great influence on me as my mentor) I just didn’t like them at the time. However, to cut a long story short, I think Phil is really ahead of the game. It really took me some time to see the true significance and beauty of the works. His use of video games is extremely personal, poetic and ingenious. Something I do not see often in other machinima works.

IP Yuk-Yui, PSYCHO(S), 2011

"computational cinema / 2006 / co-artist: CHOI Sai-Ho PSYCHO(S) is a live remix of Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO and Gus Van Sant’s remake in 1998. Running on custom software that edits the films in real-time, PSYCHO(S) juxtaposes and condenses the two films that were made almost 40 years apart into a hypnotic stream of mirror images. The images and sounds, drifting in and out of sync, create a perpetual state of cinematic déjà vu that haunts and confuses both the original and its double. PSYCHO(S) recycles the original narratives, forming new poetic associations in an endless cycle of parallel edits." (IP Yuk-Yui)

GVA: When and why did you begin using video games in your practice?

I am always interested in video games. But I didn’t explicitly incorporate video games as elements in my works until 2011. The reason for using video games in my works is simple: I am an avid gamer that perhaps spends a little bit too much time on playing video games. In other words, games play a significant part in my world and everyday life. Naturally they are obvious choices for me as artistic materials.

GVA: Why did you specifically choose a video game to make art? What do you find especially fascinating about this medium? Its interactivity? Agency? Aesthetics? Theatricality?

I use the Call of Duty games because they are the games that I play almost on a daily basis. I am fascinated by the landscapes inside the games. These virtual landscapes are things that one usually misses when one is engaged with the super fast-paced gameplay. However, if you pause the shooting for a while and focus on the landscapes behind, you will realize these landscapes are amazing tableaux that one can stare at for hours. For me, these landscapes entail a quality that I found more deadly than the first-person shootings as in the original games.

IP Yuk-Yiu, The Plastic Garden, 2013

"HD / color / stereo / 11 min. / 16:9 / 2013 Evoking imagery and memories of the atomic age, THE PLASTIC GARDEN summons the ghost of a forgotten future, the grim fatality of a total nuclear war that held the world hostage half a century ago. Hacking and appropriating the popular video game CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS (2010), THE PLASTIC GARDEN revisited the dark vision and symbolism of the nuclear drama that seems on the one hand remotely archaic, but hauntingly close and familiar on the other. The restaged scenes, devoid of bloody shootouts, are equally if not more lethal and violent than in the original game. THE PLASTIC GARDEN unravels a forgotten future that felt like an endless nightmare spinning loose, or else a collective death wish that comes to define the tragic essence of modern socio-political reality." (IP Yuk-Yiu)

GVA: Digital games often create parallel, alternative experiences for its users. How do you relate to the complex relation between reality and simulation? How do you address this tension through your work?

Video games are often viewed as simulation of reality. But sometimes I would rather see them as a kind of extended reality. Like other things or objects in the world, video games are artifacts that help to form and define what we may call reality. On this note, I think video games can be conceived less as a kind of symbolic parallel, but rather a direct extension of our everyday reality that warrants exploration and manipulation.

GVA: The creative opportunities afforded by machinima are greatly constrained by existing copyright law, which prohibits many possible uses, including commercial purposes. What’s your take on the paradoxical nature of this artform?

I think the issue is not new and somewhat similar to the problems faced by other strands of appropriation art. In a world that is governed by big bucks and big corporations, artists sometimes have to take risks in their creative practices, which is not easy sometimes. Copyright is just one issue among many.

GVA: Would you agree that machinima has democratized the art making process? Has it lowered the entry barrier for creators of video art, as some critics argue?

It really depends on what do we mean by “democratization” and “machinima”. Personally I tend to be suspicious and skeptical. I don’t believe in any technological determinist arguments that see socio-cultural effects as direct outcomes of certain technology or technological process.

IP Yuk-Yiu, Another Day of Depression in Kowloon, 2012

"HD / color / stereo / 15 min. 30 sec or loop / 16:9 / 2012 ANOTHER DAY OF DEPRESSION IN KOWLOON (九龍百哀圖) is a virtual study and a digital portrait of Hong Kong as seen through the lens of contemporary popular culture incarnated in the forms of video game and screen media. Using the map “KOWLOON” from the popular video game CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS (2010) as a field of study, the filmmaker conducted a yearlong virtual fieldwork: playing, observing and documenting “Hong Kong” as simulated in the video game world. ANOTHER turns the violent first-person shooter into a series of vacant, uncanny and yet meditative tableaux, unearthing a formal poetry that is often overlooked during the original gameplay. It combines methodologies from both the observational and assemblage film traditions in raising questions about cultural representations in contemporary popular media, while at the same time creating evocative metaphors for a post-colonial Hong Kong through the reworking of media materials. ANOTHER is a “found” landscape film, a ballad for a post-colonial Hong Kong seemingly trapped in endless downpours of murky political dismal." (IP Yuk-Yiu)

GVA: How do video game aesthetics affect the overall impact of your work? What comes first, the concept or the medium?

I am not sure how video game aesthetics affect the impact of my work. For me video games are an integrated part of my everyday life that I usually don’t think of them separately as “concept” and “medium”. They are part of my world that seeks for my attention, observation and reflection.

GVA: How and why did you use Call of Duty to create Clouds Fall?

Like the previous two chapters in the trilogy: Another Day of Depression in Kowloon (2012) and The Plastic Garden (2013), Clouds Fall (2014) uses Call of Duty as its base materials. Clouds Fall is the most ambitious attempt in the trilogy since it incorporates and works with elements from almost the entire Call of Duty series (instead of focusing on just a single map which I did in the first two.) As I mentioned above, I use Call of Duty partly because it is a series that I am most familiar with and knowledgeable of. At the same time, I am interested in the cultural logic behind/beyond the obvious bloodsheds and gunfights of the games in the series.

GVA: What links the different parts of your trilogy? What do all these scenarios have in common?

The most obvious link is, of course, the video game series Call of Duty, which forms the base materials for the trilogy. But I think there is something more subtle and important that connects the three works together beyond this obvious fact, which has something to do more with my thinking and approach in treating the games in my works. Many people might consider the trilogy as a series of found media or appropriation work that deals critically with cultural representations of popular media via video games, which of course it is. For instance, in Another Day of Depression in Kowloon, I am interested in exploring how popular media represents Hong Kong; while in The Plastic Garden, I want to restage the dark symbolism of the atomic age that got imprinted in our public imaginary via popular culture. However, beyond all these interesting and complex issues that have to do with our signifying and representational systems, I am equally interested in staring at the blanks of the virtual skies and its surrounding landscapes inside the games, and derive pleasures and inspirations from them. Therefore I also consider the trilogy as a sort of observational work. When I made this series of works, I often considered myself as a flâneur and a filmmaker navigating and shooting in a (virtual) world. Just like when I made my camera films or photographic-based works, I am confronting and observing an environment and its unfolding. In this sense, I feel this series of work is as much about observation and documentation as it is about cultural representation via media appropriation. I think this is what united the three works together in the series for me.